Chapter 9: Opening Space: Collaboratively Developing a Supervisor Community of Practice

The scene above describes a typical meeting of the supervisor professional learning community that is the focus of this chapter. At its inception, it supported field supervisors from elementary education and special education teacher training programs within University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Education. Now, six years later, it supports supervisors working within elementary, special education, secondary education, music, physical education, art, and world languages teacher training programs. In this chapter, we describe the development of this learning community, highlighting the foundational perspectives upon which it was created, the core practices we utilized, key considerations, and next steps to share a model for professional learning we feel is essential, replicable, and key to supervisor success.